I read in bed, propped on a pillow, usually starting around 10:30pm. Within ten or fifteen minutes I am rereading the same paragraph and then I am gone. This has been going on for about two years, and I have four books with bookmarks stuck around page 40. I genuinely enjoy reading when I manage it on a train or on holiday, so I do not think the problem is the books. What do people actually do about this?
Also, some of those four bookmarked books are probably boring and you are being too loyal. Give a book fifty pages. If you are not gripped, abandon it without guilt. Nothing kills a reading habit faster than an obligation to finish something you are not enjoying, because the whole activity starts to feel like homework.
I keep a shelf of books I stopped. It is not a shelf of failures, it is a shelf of things that were not for me at that time.
The fifty page rule saved reading for me. I used to grind through a bad book for a month and then not read anything for six weeks afterwards because the whole thing felt like a chore.
Try short stories or essays for a while. Ten pages is a complete unit, so falling asleep afterwards is a finished thing rather than an interruption, and you stop losing the thread of a plot across a week. Once the habit is back, novels get much easier.
Audiobooks count. I know some people are sniffy about that and they are wrong. Walking, cooking and washing up gave me back roughly five hours a week, and the same brain is doing the same work. If plot is what you are losing, an audiobook keeps continuity far better than four nights of ten drowsy pages.
One book at a time, and carry it with you. Four books with bookmarks means four separate mental contexts to reload. Pick the one you liked most, finish it, and put the other three back on the shelf until it is done.
@margin_notes_mo · 2mo ago · 3 replies
Stop trying to read at 10:30pm lying down. You are not failing at reading, you are succeeding at falling asleep, which is what your body has been trained to do in that position at that hour.
Things that worked for me, roughly in order of how much they helped:
The train and holiday detail in your post is the answer hiding in plain sight. You read fine when you are upright and not tired. The problem is scheduling, not attention.
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@sashcord_stu · 2mo ago
The chair thing is genuinely the biggest single change. I put a lamp and an uncomfortable-ish armchair in the corner of the bedroom and my finished book count roughly doubled in a year.
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@capsule_curious · 2mo ago
Fifteen minutes at lunch adds up faster than people expect. At a normal reading pace that is around twenty pages, which is a book a month without touching your evenings.
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